Sundar Pichai Confirms That The Next Android Version Will Be Previewed At Google I/O Along With Android Wear And Android TV

Normally when a major Android version is released, we slowly see design guidelines changed, and then see the new version dropped soon after. However Sundar Pinchai at Google has just confirmed in an interview that the company will be previewing the next version of Android at Google I/O tomorrow. But that’s not all he’s had to say teasing the event.

Before dropping the huge news that Google would be previewing the next Android version at I/O, Sundar confirmed that Android TV will be announced tomorrow. Sundar said that while he loved Google TV, it had nowhere near the capabilities of what Android TV will have. Google hopes to unify the experience for televisions with Android TV.

“We will have more to say about Android TV… We look across televisions and it’s no different from how smartphones were. It was very fragmented, with different underlying operating systems… and no consistent way for developers to target across the breadth of smartphones, etcetera. We see same things with televisions.

I think it is going to be hard for individual OEMs to create a platform on top of which people will write content and services and which users will transact. If you buy content and services from your television, do you expect it to work on your tablet? If I bought something on my tablet, do I expect it to seamlessly run on my television? That’s the power that Android and an end-to-end experience can provide… It will work across everything. “

After that he had a little to say about Google’s new wearable platform, Android Wear. The new platform will be discussed at length during tomorrow’s keynote including manufacturing partners and devices that are compatible with Android Wear.

He’ll also talk about Android Wear, a version of the operating system for fitness trackers and wearable computers, and he’ll announce new manufacturing partners and devices. Google is racing against Apple, which will introduce its iWatch in the fall. Pichai says it’s “crazy” that people visit their doctors at most once a year to have their heart rate and blood pressure measured. “You obviously need to be able to measure these things so many more times and then apply more intelligence to it,” he says.

Last but most certainly not least, Google will be announcing the next version of Android and previewing it. This is similar to what Apple does with new iOS releases. Google will likely allow developers to use the new version on their devices until the public release later this year.

This year, Pichai will preview the next release (Lollipop? Lemonhead?) for the first time at I/O rather than waiting until the fall. It’s a significant shift toward greater transparency. “I want the world to understand what we are doing sooner,” he says.

All this information comes from an interview Sundar did with Businessweek which you can read in it’s entirety here.

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